Alright folks, the latest release of Luminar by Skylum is just around the corner, and with that they’ve released another sneak peek into some of the new tools that are coming for those up upgrade. While we’ve already covered the Sky replacement tools, and the Structure/Detail tools, this most recent revelation from Skylum is sure to raise some eyebrows. This time we’re getting some information on their next new plugin, the “AI Skin Enhancer and AI Portrait Enhancer” Tools. We haven’t gotten hands on with this feature yet, but here’s what the press release from Skylum has to show and say about the new AI features.

What is AI Skin Enhancer?

Thanks to the AI technology, faces and skin are automatically detected throughout a photo. AI Skin Enhancer allows photographers to automatically remove various skin imperfections like acne, freckles and moles, in addition to smoothing the skin. At the same time, skin pores and other small details like hair and eyelashes are preserved.

Gone are the days of manually highlighting skin and face areas with tedious selections and masks. With AI Skin Enhancer, a person’s skin is retouched automatically, but you retain complete control over the strength of the improvement.

Perfect for studio beauty shots or events like weddings, AI Skin Enhancer will help bring your creative vision to the forefront. Photographers can deliver a professional look in mere seconds that your portrait’s subject will never forget.

What is Portrait Enhancer?

Portrait Enhancer is a collection of tools that help improve the photo of any person in a natural, yet pleasing way. These tools are brand new to Luminar 4 making it now possible to highlight and improve primary features of a person’s face.

Before & After using the Luminar 4 AI Portrait & Skin Enhancer

This tool includes adjustments for eight areas:

Face-aware Lighting: Adjust lighting for a face that doesn’t impact the rest of the scene. Get the emulation of a flash or reflector aimed at a face.

Eye Improvement: Enhance and make a person’s eyes more expressive and sharp as well as whiten pupils.

Face Contouring: Adjust the shape and contour of the face, achieving more attractive results in your portrait.

Eye Enlargement: Is your portrait subject not fully awake yet? Squinting in bright light? Bring their eyes to life by gently increasing the size of their eyes.

Eyebrows: Thicken and darken brows for stronger framing of the eyes.

Lips and Teeth Enhancement: Bring more color and depth to a person’s lips, and take advantage of teeth whitening tools.

With Portrait Enhancer, you can achieve a professional-looking portrait and make facial features more expressive with just a few sliders. There’s no need for selections or masks, AI technology instantly targets the right areas. Plus built-in presets easily adapt to each portrait making this tool the perfect balance of speed and precision.

The Power of AI Means Ease of Use, Without Sacrificing Control

The two new portrait tools are only available in Luminar 4 (coming this fall). Luminar 4 can run as a standalone application or a plugin for Adobe applications like Photoshop, Lightroom Classic and Photoshop Elements, or Apple software like Photos for macOS and Aperture.

Both tools highlight Skylum’s advancements in the machine learning space, and feature human-aware precision editing. Tasks like selections, masks and layers are eliminated, which turns portrait retouching from potentially hours of work, to less than a minute per photo.

The announcement comes on the heels of Skylum having announced AI Structure (for added details) and AI Sky Replacement filters. These new AI tools join the popular Accent AI (for perfect exposure and color) and AI Sky Enhancer found in Luminar 3.

“Being able to enhance portraits is a skillset that our customers have been asking for,” said Alex Tsepko, CEO of Skylum. “AI Skin Enhancer will provide automated skin retouching, removing things like blemishes helping to smooth the skin, while Portrait Enhancer will bring customizable tools to help create professional portraits like never before. A photographer can unlock the beauty of an image in seconds, which means there’s no reason to not get the best from every photo.”

Both tools will assist photographers in elevating their portraits without putting forth a significant amount of work and time. Getting quality portrait results has never been easier, whether you’re photographing a studio portrait, wedding, event or headshot. Both tools are designed to work with studio lights and off-camera flash as well as natural-light photography. Since it is available as both an application and plugin, Luminar fits every photographer’s workflow.

Bringing Professional Results To Everyday Portraits

Luminar’s new Portrait Enhancer and AI Skin Enhancer is great for any type of portrait, and can integrate seamlessly into your current editing workflow. Gone are the days of manually masking in and out certain adjustments. Now, photographers can save time and achieve professional results with Luminar 4!

Pricing and Availability

Luminar 4 is set to be released this fall with pre-orders are now available on skylum.com. Get a discount on Luminar 4 in a special bundle for just $69 or $99 in a bundle with Luminar 3 for new users. Owners of Luminar 3 or Luminar Flex plugin can also upgrade at a discount.

Final Thoughts

Now, having not gotten hands on with this specific feature, we can only go by what they’ve said, but based on how impressive the previous 2 releases have been and worked, i have little reason to doubt these tools abilities. We should get hands on within a week, and trust me, i’ll update this post to show some before/afters and my thoughts once that happens.

The part that does interest me, is that we’ve seen some of these sort of tools around before in applications like Portrait Pro, and even within Adobe Photoshop‘s own Liquify tool, but what we haven’t seen is these all bundled together in a single package rolled into a one stop shop before. I’m a Capture One & Adobe guy through and through, but I have to admit that the Skylum folks are really putting their A-Game out with the Luminar 4, and could give the “big guys” a solid run for their money. We’ll just have to wait for the official release and test it out to see how that goes.

Until then, let me know in the comments what you think of these new features and if/how you’d use them in your work.

David J. Crewe is a full-time commercial photographer and Senior Editor with SLR Lounge. Based out of both Southern California & Las Vegas, Nevada. View his work and blog: DavidJCrewe.com
Follow his Instagram: @DavidJCrewe